Listless and inefficient as those people are, germs of energy are known to have been fostered among them, which have sometimes developed; and the De Vines always retained enough of their ancestral vigor to counteract their ancestral pride, as well as their sense of unmerited misfortune, and to keep them somewhat above the general hopeless prostration of the class into which they had fallen. Aunty Losh, widowed by the Rebellion, and left childless, had settled in the little hut on the headland, with her two nephews, mere boys at the time, but now grown to efficient manhood. The elder one, Dennis, was stalwart and courageous, and became a successful fisherman on a small scale. Sylvester had also assisted in the common support, and together they had made a little headway. But in Sylvester the ambition for something higher had awaked: he had not only learned to read, but had actually become a student, and was now taking steps toward what seemed to his aunt and brother the attainment of a distant and dangerous witchcraft--namely, making himself a lawyer. Neither of them believed that he would ever accomplish this chimerical design, but Sylvester's scheme was always present to them in the guise of an impending danger, which was just as dreadful as if it had been realized. In fact, it was worse, because it seemed to them a spell in which he had been caught, and to which his life would ultimately be sacrificed. They regarded him with the mingled envy and commiseration that we are apt to bestow upon those who have the strength to devote themselves to an idea which we think is going to prove a failure. Dennis, on the contrary, had never troubled himself to learn anything beyond that which his own instinct and contact with the forces around him could teach. There was a vague tradition stored up in the dust-heaps of Aunty Losh's mind, to the effect that his ancestor, the Major, had once at the siege of Savannah cut his way through the British with a detachment of Pulaski's Legion, and that in so doing he had slain with his own hand eleven of the enemy. Well, it was with the same sort of desperate rush that Dennis cut his way through the problems of existence. He was good for a short, sharp struggle, but he was not steady, and had no ability to plan long manoeuvres or patient campaigns. A streak of fierceness remained in him, also, derived from the man who had been so deadly to his enemies when placed in a perilous dilemma. As there were no British opposed to him, it did not manifest itself in just the same way; and, thus far, being temperate in his habits and having no foes so far as any one knew, he had not slain anybody. But his passionate impulses asserted themselves plainly enough at times, to the discomfort not only of others, but also of himself.